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Jaddoland is a film about exile and diaspora. But just as powerfully, it is a film about home.

Lahib Jaddo, the woman at the center of the film, is a mixed-media artist. Born in Iraq, she has lived in Lubbock, Texas for more than three decades. Her daughter, Nadia Shihab, is the filmmaker. So, two visual artists, mother and daughter, who understand each other’s aesthetic pleasures and obsessions.

Lahib’s home is the heart of the film. Her front porch, with its terracotta-colored wall, sky blue wall, and bright green door, is home base: throughout the film, we keep coming back to this space, and it’s always a welcome sight.

Two women, mother and daughter, both making visual art, but differently, the mother focused on her own inner journey, the daughter in love with the beauty of the world she frames through her lens. Often, she sets up her camera on a tripod, frames her shot, and lets the action unfold so she can participate in it. We see the sensuality of these two women as they go about their days. They make Arabic stuffed vegetables together; we watch their hands as they talk. We come to recognize the mother’s hand because of the small blue tattoo between thumb and forefinger.

Lahib says: “I don’t make art to make pretty things to hang in my house or to sell. That’s not my priority. I make it because it helps me understand my life.” Nadia tells us that she and her mother used to go on long drives into the countryside around Lubbock, where her mother found landscapes, vast, ridged and rugged, that were “a mirror image of Iraq.” Nadia’s voice-over, a bit tentative and self-conscious at first, takes us through the film, so we learn how she sees things. She is fascinated by her mother’s face, where she sees the “vastness of her longing.”

Watching the face of this ripe, lovely woman, I saw great discontent, perhaps a restlessness that moved her in and out of several marriages and love affairs, with periods of solitude in between, where she comes back to herself, explores her own moods, and does a lot of painting. She calls these times “the luxury of living within my own world.” Through it all, she maintains a kind of reticence, a dignity. The daughter’s visits don’t seem to interrupt this process. Much as Nadia makes images of her mother, Lahib often paints images that refer to her own mother, especially her mother’s burdens, her displacements, her strength and her eventual wearing-down.

Lahib Jaddo was born in Baghdad of Turkmen Iraqi parents in 1955. Ten years later, her father had to go into exile; we don’t learn the circumstances. He took his growing family to Beirut, and Lahib spent her formative years in this beautiful, cosmopolitan city. In 1975, civil war gripped Lebanon. It would not let go until 1990. At twenty-two, Lahib and her young husband left Lebanon for the United States. They came to Lubbock more by chance than design: he found a job there. Lahib had her two children and studied first Architecture and then Art at Texas Tech University, eventually becoming an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean at the College of Architecture. After her first marriage ended, she raised her children herself. The film doesn’t make a big deal of it, but we get a sense of her resourcefulness. When we meet her, she has lived in Lubbock for around three decades.

On the other hand, her two children, Karim and Nadia, both got out as soon as they could, settling in San Francisco. Nadia remembers a song from their adolescence: “Happiness was Lubbock, Texas – in the rearview mirror.” So, the material we are watching is Nadia’s documentation of her visits home, taken, I assume, over a period of years.

In the course of the film, four men enter the women’s domain. Two are local Texans: one opens the film and the other ends it. Both seem like “outsiders;” neither of them is filmed inside the house. The two men who enter the inner rooms of the house and belong at the heart of the film itself are Lahib’s father, Hasan Jaddo, and her son Karim. Nadia films both men as they arrive, shooting from inside the house toward the wide-open door; we wait expectantly to see who will come through. The effect is of a kind of birth in reverse: the men are delivered into the women’s space instead of being delivered out of it.

Hasan, the family patriarch, visits once every ten years, so when he comes, he stays a while. At first, Lahib looks bored or maybe even annoyed at the interruption of her life’s normal rhythms and the constant presence of this man whom she must feed and serve. But her father, who has experienced the politics of exile most directly, seems completely comfortable and at home within himself. When, during an awkward silence, Nadia asks him what he thinks of Texas, he gives the smallest possible smile and says, “It’s Texas if I like it or not.” And soon life assumes a nice rhythm again. In one of the film’s loveliest scenes, Nadia, from inside the house, films her grandfather through a window as he does his slow, meditative morning exercises, blue pajamas against green grass.

Nadia’s playful spirit, evident in a lot of her image-making, comes to the fore when her brother Karim arrives. At one point, while she’s filming him talking to someone on his cell phone about anti-Arab racism, she catches sight of his distorted reflection in the microwave door, which makes his nose enormously large. Laughing, she pans over to it and films the rest of their conversation from that angle. The film has many layered moments like this, where the viewer takes in the explicit content of what’s being said, and at the same time picks up on the deeper strands of the relationships within the family. As a filmmaker and as a sister, Nadia delights in letting a conversation about anti-Arab racism play out over a distorted image of an Arab man (who just happens to be her brother) with his impossibly enormous nose. He says, “You’re not putting that in the film, are you?” Hmmm. Family life.

The film takes us through a cycle of the seasons. But within each season, the sequences themselves are not necessarily chronological; it seems that the filmmaker has used material she’s accumulated over several years to construct a story for each single season.

As the family draws into itself during the winter, memories emerge through old family videos that they watch together and cell phone conversations they have with relatives who are far away. The Jaddo clan are Iraqi Turkmen originally from Kirkuk and Tel Afar; Hasan’s own father was a noted musician; Hasan and his brothers formed a successful musical group, with his wife Najiba the lead singer. We see old video of a much younger Hasan sing with joy while a kid plays music on an electric keyboard. Najiba sings, “I wish I were three pebbles at the bottom of the sea.” The year after this video was filmed, they had to march out of their houses into Northern Iraq. The mixture of pleasure and pain is palpable.

Music matters a lot in this film. The film’s score, composed by Nadia and Mark David Ashworth, makes a bridge between Lahib Jaddo’s daily life and the “vast longing” her daughter senses beneath it. The cinematography is beautiful, and the subtle musical score is attentive to the image: this documentary could be used in cinema studies.

Because Jaddoland is such a personal exploration, many issues come together within it, including issues of exile, diaspora, immigration and assimilation across generations – though the historical issues that compelled the family’s exile in the first place would need elucidation in supplementary texts. The film also addresses to the intersection of Women’s and Middle East Studies. And in what must be a very rare occurrence, it turns out that two women in this family are filmmakers, and each has looked at the family from her own perspective: Lahib’s younger sister, Parine Jaddo, has made a film called Broken Record about their singer-mother, Najiba. It would be fascinating to look both these films together.

As much as anything else, though, Jaddoland is about the “Women’s Quarters” – the space where women can comfortably be alone together, which turns out to be a space much richer than most Americans realize. One could study this film alongside classic texts like Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheikh: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village, about the two years Fernea spent with women in a village where daily life was intensely gendered; or Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments, about Bedouin women’s modes of self-expression: In public, the women are reticent, almost stoic – not unlike Lahib herself. They do not show weakness, nor do they admit to pain, sorrow, or disappointment. But among themselves, they make poems and sing songs that express the full range of their emotions.

Lahib has a moment like that in Jaddoland, captured on some VHS tape that she recorded late one night in 2008, soon after her mother had died, and it is one of the most powerful moments in the film. Lahib is working on a large, semi-abstract painting of her mother that has appeared at several earlier points in the film. She sets up the camera, turns it on, and moves back and forth between her work and the lens, which she speaks to directly and spontaneously, with a depth of emotion I fully believe, and yet, like a great actress, she’s in complete control, shaping the moment, giving it form. While Arabic music plays in the background, she says to the camera, “What can I say to you? The people I care about have all gone far away from me. And the people I was not close to are now all I have…What can I do? I’ll paint until this song ends. It’s time to sleep.”

But this is also a story of resilience. At the end of the film, Lahib ends her time alone, turns to a new man, marrying him and moving with him to Saint Augustine, Florida. She puts Lubbock, Texas in the rearview mirror. She and Nadia take her Lubbock house apart. Goodbye terracotta-colored wall, sky blue wall, bright green door. At this point, I’d seen this door so often that I felt a jolt of loss and even fear, realizing that I was seeing it for the last time. And so, the last of this filmmaker’s many gifts to her viewers is a small, sharp taste of exile.

Awards:

Austin Asian American Film Festival: Best Documentary Feature (2019); Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival: Special Jury Award for Documentary Feature (2019); New Orleans Film Festival: Special Jury Mention for Best Documentary (2018).

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